


The Thing In The Woods

by too_much_in_the_sun



Category: When the Wind Blows & The Lake House - James Patterson
Genre: Alternate Universe - Horror, Gen, Lovecraftian, Weird Tale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-11
Updated: 2019-11-11
Packaged: 2021-01-25 21:27:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21362926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/too_much_in_the_sun/pseuds/too_much_in_the_sun
Summary: A weird-fiction take on the scene where Frannie sees Max for the first time.H. P. Lovecraft story idea, James Patterson prose.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 2





	The Thing In The Woods

**Author's Note:**

> I would never have started writing this fic without the encouragement of tumblr user maxtothemax. So I’d like to take this opportunity to thank them for their kindness.

It began with a dead bird in a shoebox.

When you work as a veterinarian in a semi-rural town, people bring you all kinds of strange things, some living and some dead, and often in containers you wouldn’t expect. I’ve had people bring me things like half a deer in a portable cooler, a family of opossums in a cat carrier, and an unidentifiable roadkill in a trash bag. A dead bird in the box that had once held someone’s Nikes was nothing in comparison.

I knew Steve the minute he walked into my office. He’s the only guy around who pairs grease-stained work pants and boots with Grateful Dead shirts on a regular basis, and besides, if you can’t learn to recognize everyone in town by sight within a year, you should really move somewhere else. The year-round population of Bear Bluff is so low that you can fit just about every one of them into the Black Bear Diner without getting uncomfortable.

Steve isn’t what I’d call a regular customer of mine; usually I only see him if his dog Chief needs updated vaccinations, or, on one memorable occasion, to have about a hundred porcupine spines pulled out of his face. Chief, I mean. Not Steve. But every once in a while, Steve brings in something he wants to show me, mostly pieces of petrified wood or fish fossils. Odd as it might sound, Steve has an interest in science in general – what they once called natural philosophy - and I’m the only person in town who will actually _look_ at the weird things he turns up.

On this particular day, he seemed troubled. It was fall, and a spell of unseasonably warm weather had just ended, leaving a number of people in vaguely foul moods as temperatures dropped. Every time the wind picked up, leaves fell from the trees in the dozens, and in the rare moments of cloudless skies, each beam of sunlight highlighted a universe of floating particles. I was mulling over the possibility of packing up and going for one last trip into the mountains, before winter came in full force, when he walked in, carrying a battered orange shoebox.

“Frannie,” he said, “you have to see this.”

“What have you brought me today, Steve?” I said lightly, coming around the desk to meet him. He handed off the shoebox – it was light, with the hint of shifting weight that told me some small object was indeed inside - and a look of relief instantly crossed his face. The only emotions Steve usually shows are directly related to either the Broncos winning, or the Grateful Dead coming to play in Boulder.

“Open it. You’ll see.”

I lifted the lid, and, there on a folded paper towel, was a dead sparrow, its wings extended with the pathetic limpness of death, one wingtip seemingly reaching for the corner of the box. “Usually you bring me something _interesting_,” I said, and turned to grab a pair of gloves. “What happened to this poor little guy?”

“Found it on the trail while I was out for a walk the other day.” As I pulled the gloves on, he watched each little movement of my hands with a strange attentiveness. “I thought it was just some leaves in a little pile, but then I saw it had feet and a beak, and I realized it was a sparrow or something.”

“Happens all the time,” I said, “but why bring it in?” I cupped my hands under the tiny body and lifted it up, supporting the wings with my fingers – and the _other_ wings flopped free, gravity pulling them back down.

I’d like to say I said something witty, but the honest truth is that I flinched and dropped it back in the box. Steve gave a short, dead little bark of a laugh. “That’s why.”

“Well, I’ll give you this, Steve,” I said. “This might be the most interesting thing you’ve ever brought me.”

I wish I could’ve known how right I was. And what roads it would lead me down.

* * *

I reached out to an old professor of mine from Miskatonic – Richard Armitage is well past retirement age by now, but has forgotten more about avian anatomy than most people will ever learn.

_It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before_, he wrote back. _Nothing from Earth, at least._

_What do you mean? _I wrote back. _Are you suggesting that it’s extraterrestrial?_

_Of course not,_ _Frannie_, he said in his next message. _I meant just what I said, that I’ve never seen anything like it. Without examining it myself, there’s not much I can say that would be useful. A necropsy might be interesting. _

He was right, of course. When I’d put the shoebox in the back of my lab freezer, I’d mostly just wanted to put it somewhere I wouldn’t have to look at it. But it meant I still had the sparrow on ice, available for testing when I had the time. And Armitage’s emails made me want to get around to that sooner rather than later. Performing a necropsy, as he had suggested, would tell me something about the sparrow’s life and death - hopefully something useful.

It was his next email, though, that haunted me until I pulled the shoebox out of the freezer, and that still haunts me, not because of its content, exactly, but because of where it ended up leading me. It was only this:

_Frannie — sorry to write again so soon, but while I was teaching class earlier I remembered your little _ _ lusus naturae _ _ and had a thought: _

_What if there are more like it?_

As I got ready to open the sparrow up, I looked it over carefully. Grossly speaking, it was normal, dusty brown plumage smooth and healthy, all the expected body parts present and accounted for. _Except_.

Four wings, each perfectly formed - the teeth of some small predator had torn their flesh, but in life they would have been entirely normal... except for the fact that there were four of them.

I’ll skip the details on everything else I found in the necropsy, because none of it was interesting. None of it stuck in my head quite like those wings did.

Supernumerary body parts, while rare, do usually obey a simple rule: the duplicated body part is relatively uncomplex. Entire limbs are the rarest of the rare, and are more commonly an extra leg or pair of legs, though supernumerary arms are not entirely unknown in human beings.

I had never heard of a supernumerary _pair_ of arms, or of a supernumerary wing in a bird at all. Armitage said that he hadn’t either, and that left me with an unsettled feeling as I reassessed the condition of the wings to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. If he hadn’t seen such a thing, I was inclined to conclude it didn’t exist in the literature.

The second time around, the second pair of wings refused to vanish in my hand, or to become any less perfectly formed. Gently examining the little dead thing, I saw that the torso was more elongated than usual – long enough to seamlessly fit two pairs of wings. The muscles felt normal, looked normal as best as I could see. The eyes, closed in death, had lost their black luster.

It was an adult, and in good condition, so whatever defect had caused this hadn’t influenced its ability to survive to adulthood, or to feed itself. It had just had the bad luck to be attacked by whatever small predator – maybe a semi-feral cat, judging from the appearance of the wounds - had taken one bite and let it lie.

I laid the tiny body down. The unsettled feeling I’d been having all day was, I realized, two feelings. I was a little excited to be holding what might be a very important scientific discovery. I can’t deny that. But I was also disturbed, because nothing about the sparrow looked abnormal or deformed; it was as though it had come from another world, where this was the normal anatomy of a bird.

“Where’d you come from?” I said, half to myself and half to it. “Who made you?”

* * *

It was pretty obvious what I had to do next. I had to go where the sparrow had been found and see if there were more like it – a one-off birth defect is one thing, but in my heart I wondered if there might not be a whole breeding population of four-winged sparrows in the backwoods. Stranger things have happened. The coelacanth was thought to have been extinct for millions of years before a fisherman caught one in 1938. And if you’re going to hide a bizarre animal anywhere, the deep ocean and the deep forest are the places to do it.

So I set out into the woods, with Steve’s unclear directions in hand, to find my flock of little monsters.

You can never know _everything_ about these woods, but you can come to know them well, and the prospect of some part of my forest I didn’t know yet, something hiding in plain sight, gave me a pleasant thrill of fear. I had thought I knew the possibilities of what was out there, but now I was faced with a little patch of the unknown right there in my own backyard. How could I resist?

I wish I had. I really wish I had.

The main drag – or what passes for it, anyway – in Bear Bluff runs through the center of town, then west-northwest towards the mountains. As the crow flies, the next fragment of civilization along that line is a firewatch tower in southeast Idaho. In between is a lonely stretch of mountainous, heavily forested land that I fell in love with the first time I came here. Some of it was once owned by mining corporations that went bust, for the most part, before the Great Depression, but much of it isn’t owned by anyone in particular, or belongs to the government. I’ve found myself thinking now and then that, if I wanted to hide something, _really_ hide something, that nameless expanse of forest northwest of town would be my first and last choice of location.

That thought came back to me again as I laced up my hiking boots and got ready to head out on a cool morning less than a week after Steve first came to my door. (I’m a busy woman – it took me that long just to clear my schedule a little.)

See, the few mines that are out there are mostly played out. The trees aren’t worth the money and effort to log. You sure as hell couldn’t graze cattle out there. And sheer remoteness precludes most other applications for that land. It’s beautiful country, don’t get me wrong, but it’s also some of the last true wilderness left in the lower 48.

There could be _anything_ out there.

If you’re not from the West, or if you haven’t lived out here, I’m not sure I can really make clear to you how literally I mean that word “anything”. Colorado gets more than its fair share of reported Bigfoot sightings every year, and for good reason: there’s a lot of animal life in our forests and mountains, and not a lot of human beings. People get scared, and they see what they want to see.

Mismanagement and abuse of natural resources have left their mark on this land, but decades of careful tending have helped restore some of the ancient balance it once had. Deer and elk are doing so well for themselves that the population has to be managed by the allotment of hunting licenses. Foxes and coyotes have found a home for themselves at the margins of human societies, but it was their larger cousins I thought of that morning as I drove out to the trailhead.

The gray wolf, _Canis lupus_, was eradicated from Colorado in the early decades of the twentieth century. It was the victim, mostly, of ranchers defending their cattle from the predators whose territory they had invaded. This is a common story in the West – where there were ranchers and wolves together on a patch of land, the wolves did not survive.

Fifty years after the last wolf was shot in Colorado, reintroduction efforts began up north in Yellowstone National Park. Ranchers still haven’t recognized the right of wolves to live in the park – being wild animals with no concept of human borders, they’re more than happy to wander out and feed on cattle herds nearby. And as the wolf population has grown in Yellowstone, wolves seeking a territory of their own have wandered south, down through the Rockies and into Colorado. Every now and then the Denver Post reports another wolf sighting, and I always think the same thing:

Where there’s one, there’s more.

Wolves are, by nature, shy of humans. They have to be, in order to survive in the world we’ve created. But we know where they are by the physical evidence they leave – their pawprints, the bodies of animals they’ve fed on, a blurry photo taken by a gas station owner late at night. They can hide, but not forever.

And a wolf, even a puppy, is much bigger than a sparrow.

I didn’t grow up here – I moved to Colorado fifteen years ago, after I finished veterinary school. That’s not such a long time, but it’s long enough I’ve become more or less familiar with the forest and mountains that surround me here, though I still see something new and enchanting every day. Everything here is full of wonder for me – the mountains that rise up at my back, the foothills separating me from rolling plains to the east, the snow in winter and the unforgiving sun in summer.

There’s a limit to how much wonder you can feel, though, before it begins to turn to horror. You can only stand to see so much that’s new.

Main Street doesn’t end, _per se_ – it drops from two paved lanes down to gravel, then a pair of wheel ruts that fade into the forest and eventually vanish. As I passed the transition to gravel, I was grateful it had been dry the past few weeks, because that meant I could coax my Subaru just a little further up the dirt track without getting bogged down in mud.

Steve, I knew, came out this way on a regular basis to walk – it’s not exactly an unpopular spot, but Steve probably comes here the most. The land back there belongs, on paper at least, to Ron Clarkson, but Ron is fairly permissive about access to his land. He has enough on his hands helping his brother-in-law run the Black Bear in town. Most of the year he doesn’t even put a chain up to block the road to cars.

The air was very clear that morning, and cool – a perfect late-fall day, in my opinion, the kind you get just before the weather starts to get cold in earnest. All around me, the woods were very quiet. Our pine forest may not be as picturesque in autumn as the changing leaves in New England, where I went to school, but it has a subtle beauty all its own.

Every tree, every stone, every little mound of pine duff I saw as I walked seemed to be steeped in some occult mystery, just beyond my sight. What cast that shadow on the path? (Just a tree branch above my head.) What made that noise? (Leaves blowing in the wind.)

It wasn’t perfectly still as I set off; a low breeze blew through the pines, and overhead a bank of clouds were spreading across the sky. I could smell woodsmoke from someone’s house in town – that was how clear the air was. Usually our first snow down in Bear Bluff comes a little after Halloween, but judging just from the feel of the air, I thought there might be a little snow, deeper in the mountains, as early as that night.

The most recent, active human use this patch of land saw was a solid fifty or sixty years ago. Ron’s grandfather Jeff built a hunting cabin out here, and when he passed away, it went to Ron via his father, Frank. Thus the road, by the way – it leads up to the cabin, and if you keep going, on what eventually becomes a nearly-invisible footpath, you’ll come to Jeff’s favorite fishing spot, on the bank of a stream-fed little lake tucked deep in the forest.

Somewhere along the road, or the path it became, was where Steve had found the sparrow. He said he’d marked the spot, so I kept an eye out for stone cairns as I walked.

For a while I saw nothing out of the ordinary – just the dirt road snaking through the trees up ahead, its edges softened by drifts of dry October leaves. Overhead I heard crows calling to each other, and once I saw a jay flit from the lower branches of a lodgepole pine to land softly on a fallen log nearby.

But nothing_ weird_, you know?

I mentioned Bigfoot sightings earlier for a good reason: while most animals are fairly reclusive around humans, and their daily schedules don’t align with the times when humans are most likely to go hiking, if you’re out for a hike and see something moving in the trees, it’s not Bigfoot. It’s just a regular animal. Maybe a moose, maybe a bear. Maybe even just leaves blowing in the wind.

It’s never Bigfoot.

It took me a long time to even see that there _was_ something in the woods that day, and I only picked up on it because it didn’t fit the pattern of moose, bear, or Bigfoot. All those things, you see, blend into the forest around them. They match their environment.

But I kept seeing something moving in the woods, just out of the corner of my eye – something that didn’t move like a deer, or even a bear. I couldn’t identify it, not without really seeing it. There was just something _off_ about it.

Jeff’s old cabin is about five miles from where the road turns to gravel, three from where it degrades into a dirt track. The path isn’t perfectly level, but the gain in elevation is mild, and the dirt is well-packed enough that it’s passable as long as it’s not wet out. It’s not so far from town that it’s really out in the middle of nowhere, but it’s far enough away that, when I go there, I always feel like I’ve stepped away from the workaday world. I mean, there’s a reason I mentioned that it’s a familiar trail. People like it out there.

As I walked that morning I was slowly relaxing, working on rationalizing the whole situation to myself. It’s a good atmosphere for that. Quiet. Away from people. And there’s no cell signal up there, so even if you’re like me and tend to distract yourself whenever possible, it’s easier than usual to hear yourself think.

There’s a saying that one swallow does not make a summer, I told myself, and much the same, one four-winged sparrow does not make an undiscovered species. Birth defects happen all the time, and even severe deviations from the typical body plan don’t necessarily impact lifespan.

_Who are you kidding, Frannie_? I thought. _You don’t study birds for a living – you don’t even treat them in your clinic, you refer them out. And just because something hasn’t been seen before doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. So what if Armitage has never seen something like it before – so what if __no one__ has ever seen something like this before? There’s a first time for everything._

I was, more or less, trying to talk myself away from the conclusions my brain wanted to come to. Sometimes my thoughts just run away with me – maybe you know how that feels.

I was distracted, I admit that. I was still keeping an eye on the trail ahead – I can, in fact, walk and chew gum at the same time, so to speak – but I wasn’t paying enough attention to be absolutely positive I was really seeing _everything_. So I can’t say for certain when I first saw it. Her. When I first saw her.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

I stopped for some water when I could just see the cabin through the trees up ahead. I knew Steve hadn’t been all the way up at the lake when he found the sparrow, so it must have been somewhere near the cabin. But I hadn’t seen a cairn or anything just yet, so I was going to keep going until I saw one.

I knew, too, that it had been cold and a little misty the day Steve found it, so I thought that, if he made it as far as the cabin in the first place, he probably wouldn’t have gone too far past it. Steve knows his limits, and while going back downhill would be easier than coming uphill in the first place, he still would’ve been thinking in the back of his mind the whole time about how he still had to walk back. In the mist, seeing his breath smoke in the air, maybe feeling the cold start to cut through his jacket, he would’ve turned back before going too far.

Mist...

And I realized, just like that, that I could see something white in the trees ahead of me and to one side. I couldn’t really estimate how far away it was, but it was moving, slowly, parallel to the trail. Something about the size of a deer, weaving silently through the forest.

Just the color of it jolted me out of my reverie. White is not, in my experience, a natural color for forest animals – it doesn’t blend in with the shadows – and anyway, while animals like Arctic hares and foxes change their summer coats for white in wintertime, deer do not.

I stood very still, trying to get a better look at whatever it was. It didn’t seem to have seen me, or at least it hadn’t reacted to my presence. Cautiously, doing my best to move silently, I crept closer to it.

I still don’t really know what it was that I saw. I should’ve started out by telling you that, right at the beginning. I don’t know what it was. The only thing I can say with confidence is what it wasn’t: it wasn’t a bird, although it had wings, and it wasn’t a person, not exactly, although it walked like one.

I tried to take pictures – I’m not stupid, I knew that just a written account without photographs would immediately be dismissed – but they didn’t come out well enough to prove anything to anyone. All of them just look like blurry photos of someone in a cheap ghost costume, taken from a distance. So I’ll tell you what I remember seeing as, foot by foot, inch by inch, I tried to get closer without scaring it away.

I really, honestly thought I was seeing things for a moment. My brain couldn’t make any sense of what I was seeing. I couldn’t put it together. I saw something walking on two legs, upright, like a human being, dressed in some formless white garment. But there was something subtly wrong with the way the torso looked, bulky and oddly shaped. It – they, if this was a human, which I was inclined to think was true - came to a stop, and against my better judgment, I moved a little closer.

As I got closer, I saw two things at nearly the same time, and I don’t know which of them shocked me more.

What I saw was just this: what I was seeing wasn’t a ghost or a hallucination; just a little girl, as real as any other kid in Boulder county, as substantial as the trees around her. Just a kid, all alone in the woods. And she had _wings_.

I want to say I remember every detail perfectly, that I recall everything I saw. I’d be lying. I remember that morning well, but not _perfectly_.

She was walking towards the cabin, along a faint, but visible, trail through the pines. The way she moved was casual but alert – like she knew this patch of woods well, but was reluctant to let her guard down. She wasn’t wearing white at all – she was wearing jeans, I think, and a shirt that must have been hand-tailored to leave room for her wings.

They were light gray, almost white when contrasted with the deep shade around her, folded against her back and the sides of her ribs, and from the way they were folded I thought at first that she had no arms. Then for a moment I thought that she, like the sparrow that had brought me out here in the first place, had two sets of wings – one bulkier than the other – before I saw that she did have arms after all. My eyes had just caught, understandably, on the wings.

None of this seemed at all unreal. If it was a dreamlike experience, that was only because of how strange it was. My life had been weird and getting weirder since Steve walked into my clinic and showed me an impossible thing in a box that had once held someone’s Nike sneakers. So I was just a little bit resigned to the idea of seeing something else bizarre. Why not? Why the fuck not?

Even moving relatively slowly, we were coming to a break in the trees, and I was starting to tire of this off-trail rambling. The last thing I needed was to sprain an ankle out here, and I reasoned that the girl might find a stranger’s presence less alarming if I approached her in what was left of the sunshine – above us, the cloud cover was growing denser and denser.

She stepped into the light, and I saw why I had mistaken her arms for a second set of wings. They were covered in light gray feathers, the same shade as her wings.

I had been trying to think of what to say, and had come up with nothing. I’ve always been shy around strangers. There was a time when I wanted to be a doctor for humans, but when I realized that being a veterinarian would allow me to be a doctor without making conversation with my patients, I chose my career path without looking back. (Little did I realize at the time that I would still have to talk to their _owners_.) So I had been half-hoping that this apparition would just dissolve into thin air, because then at least I wouldn’t have to _talk_ to her.

But when I saw the feathers on her arms, and the heavy canvas grocery bag she carried in one scale-covered hand, that half-formed hope left me as if it had never been, and I called out to her without a second thought.

“Hey,” I said, too softly for her to have heard me, and then again, more loudly, “Hey!”

Her shoulders tensed, and her wings opened just a little. She turned towards me, and I saw her face up close.

I only saw her face for a moment. I want you to keep that in mind. Maybe thirty seconds or a minute, tops. So, again, I can’t be sure how much of this I really remember, and how much I just think I remember.

She had the strong, minimal features of an ivory figurine. What I had taken for short, white-blonde hair from a distance was a cap of cream-colored feathers. Her eyes were black, without white or iris – two wide, depthless pools of ink.

“My name is Frannie O’Neill,” I said. “I’m the veterinarian in town. I’m a doctor. You can trust me.”

I meant to say more – to ask where her parents were, if she was living out here by herself – but I had said too much already.

Maybe it was my name that set her off – maybe she had heard of me somewhere and already didn’t like me. But I think it was _what_ I said I was. When I said I was a doctor. _That_ set her off.

“No!” she screamed – she had a clear, strong voice – and dropped the bag. “Get away from me!”

And with the muscular grace of a hawk taking flight, she leapt into the air.

When I think about it, I still can’t explain to myself how she could possibly be able to fly. Human beings are just too big, too bulky, to fly the same way birds do. Yet she did – she opened those gorgeous gray wings out as far as they would go, and shot off into the lowering clouds.

I looked after her for a moment, speechless, until I lost track of her in the darkening clouds and the falling flakes of that year’s first snow.

* * *

I left after that – I hadn’t dressed for snow, and besides, what was I going to do, call her parents? But I watched the weather all the rest of that day, hoping the snow wouldn’t stick and turn to ice, that I’d be able to get back up the cabin road in the morning.

The next morning I got up early, before opening the clinic for the day, and drove out to the end of Main Street back up the road to the cabin. Yesterday’s snow hadn’t stuck after all, and the mud didn’t pose as much of a challenge as I had feared it might. This time I wasn’t looking for a cairn, so I drove all the way up to the cabin.

On the way up I was trying to think of the last time I was absolutely positive the cabin had been used, and thus whether it was likely that Ron would notice I had driven up here. I was pretty sure he had been up here at some point in the last five years – he likes to come up for a weekend every now and then, but he’s not as young as he used to be. He might have a caretaker come by every now and then to maintain the property a little, but they probably wouldn’t come up here again until spring if I was lucky. If I was unlucky, Ron would... well, he’d probably ask what the hell I was doing up there the next time he saw me. Which wouldn’t be until the next time his Siamese, Butch, was due for a checkup.

I parked in front of the cabin and sat there in the car for a moment, looking around me. I hadn’t been up here in a while myself; while I do enjoy hiking, I seldom have time for it. But it looked more or less as I remembered it, just a humble-looking cabin sitting in the middle of a large natural clearing, now maintained as a firebreak.

When I got there I looked around a little for tire tracks, but wasn’t surprised that I didn’t find any. If the girl I had seen yesterday was living up here, she wouldn’t need to drive to get here. And if she was still here, she would’ve heard me coming, so there was no reason to just stand around.

I had taken the canvas bag with me when I left the day before, and brought it back with me as a kind of peace offering. I grabbed it from the trunk of my car and took it with me as I walked towards the front door of the cabin.

“Hello?” I said. “It’s me. Frannie. The lady from yesterday. I brought you your groceries?”

Silence. As far as I could tell there was no one around, but maybe she was here and just keeping quiet. I stepped up onto the little front porch and knocked on the door.

It opened when my hand made contact with the wood; it must have been closed most of the way, but not all the way. And not locked, which all but confirmed my suspicion that the girl had been living here, or that someone else had. Ron, or his caretaker, would have locked up behind them.

At that point, I reasoned to myself, it was my responsibility to go inside. Ron would want to know that someone had been living in his cabin, right?

I had never been inside the cabin before, so I couldn’t say if things looked rearranged right off the bat. It didn’t have the closed-up smell that houses get when no one lives there for a while, but maybe that was just because a caretaker came by and aired it out now and then.

“Hello?” I said again. “I’m sorry if I scared you yesterday. I just wanted to help.”

It _sounded_ like no one was here, but I wanted to know for sure. I set the canvas bag down on the kitchen table and began to walk around.

The kitchen cabinets were empty, but not dusty inside. Everything was put away – no food on the counters, no dishes in the drying rack. It didn’t smell as if anyone had been cooking there recently, either.

I moved on to the living room, where the books on the shelves weren’t dusty, but the battered old couch didn’t look to have been sat on recently. The interior design didn’t look like it had been updated at all since Ron’s grandfather built the cabin; wood-paneled walls and mid-century furniture all the way. There wasn’t a television, but that didn’t surprise me too much, knowing Ron. If he came up here, it was to get away from it all – though not _too_ far away, given how close we still were to town - and if he’d wanted to watch television he would’ve stayed in town.

The two beds in the bedroom were neatly made, with a patchwork quilt folded at the bottom of each, ready for use if the night got chilly. If the beds had been slept in, they had been remade with perfect exactness.

The small bathroom was silent. No towels hung on the rack, no water dripped from the showerhead, there wasn’t even soap in the soap dish. Nothing that would betray a recent human presence.

As I came back into the living room and prepared to leave – and maybe have to explain to Ron that I’d broken into his cabin on nothing more than a hunch – my eyes fell on the wood-burning stove in the corner.

In that moment, the thing that clued me in, and really convinced me someone had been living there, was that it was warm in the cabin. Not “warm enough that the pipes won’t freeze”, warm enough to be comfortable. It took me a little while to realize that, but how often do you really think about the temperature of a room you’re in, unless it’s too hot or too cold?

And if it was warm enough to be comfortable, then – I crossed over and gently put my hand on the stove. It wasn’t hot, but it was still warm, and there were ashes left inside.

Someone had been living here, all right, and they had cleaned up after themselves as if they were afraid to betray any sign of their presence. Not in a hurry. Carefully.

But they had left the door open just enough that they would be able to get back in.

I turned off the lights on my way back out. Something felt wrong about the whole situation, and I just wanted to be done with it. I shouldn’t have come up here in the first place, I should’ve let Ron find out about the break-in on his own terms.

The front door stuck a little bit in the frame. As I gave it one last tug to get it shut, I looked down at the wood of the front porch, and saw what I must have inadvertently ignored on the way in: one long gray feather, lying there just as it must have fallen from the wing it grew on.

I must have just not noticed it when I came in. That was the only thing that made sense to me – why would a girl whose only interaction with me had been a negative one have come back just to watch me poke around where she’d been living? Wouldn’t I have heard her on the front porch?

But she’d been almost silent in the woods the day before. For all I knew she _had_ come back to watch me.

“I’m sorry I came here,” I said, suddenly afraid I’d look up and see her perched on the roof of my car, or standing in the clearing, those wings backlit by early morning sunshine, face expressionless, watching me. “But you shouldn’t stay here any longer. It’s getting cold and it’s not safe.”

Silence. I looked around and saw no one. I got in my car and I left.

* * *

That’s where my part in the story ends, I’m afraid. The next time I was able to get some time outside of work where I could’ve gone up there, an unseasonable rainstorm turned the road to mud. Honestly, I was grateful. I didn’t _want_ to go up there again, not really.

What chance did I even have of seeing her again? I was limited by having to get around on the ground, and there was no way she’d come near Bear Bluff again knowing that someone knew she’d been in the cabin.

I did start joining Steve on his walks up in that area, and going up there on my own. I had kept the feather, and the sparrow showed no signs of melting into thin air or disappearing like physical evidence of the uncanny always seems to do, but part of me wanted to see if I could find more evidence. Another four-winged sparrow. A girl with wings walking in the woods. Some hair from Bigfoot. Anything that would prove I hadn’t just had a one-time encounter with the strange.

Nothing turned up. I emailed Armitage a few months later, telling him I’d been out to the spot where the sparrow was found, but hadn’t had any luck finding more. I asked what he thought, if it was worth continuing to look.

I didn’t mention the girl.

_It’s good to hear from you, Frannie_, he wrote back. _My advice is that you have the specimen preserved, store it somewhere safe, then just forget about the whole mess._

_What do you mean forget?_ I wrote. _I’m still wondering where it came from. It could be something really big._

_That’s true,_ he said. _But you’ve got other work to do, and there’s no sense chasing after leads that may not be there. Nature can be very strange. Let it go. Sometimes these things just happen._

I wanted to believe that very badly.

I had the sparrow taxidermied by a guy in Denver whose work came recommended by a couple guys in town, and mounted it in my office at the clinic. No one’s asked yet where I found it.

My life these days is pretty much the same as always. Ron never asked me who had been in his cabin. Maybe he never noticed. He still brings his cat Butch in every six months, and every time I’m afraid that this time he’ll mention the cabin. He hasn’t yet.

Steve and I go for walks up by the cabin every weekend, weather permitting. Chief often comes along. There was a time when I wouldn’t have wanted the dog along – woodland animals are not, generally speaking, fans of the common domestic canine – but now I was grateful to have him panting beside us as we made our way through the woods.

After all... there could be _anything_ out there.

**Author's Note:**

> This whole fic was kind of an excuse to riff on the parts of _When The Wind Blows_ where James Patterson goes extremely in-depth into his detailed character design for Max. The last time I reread the book, I had recently reread H. P. Lovecraft's novella "The Dunwich Horror", and his description of Wilbur Whateley was still rattling around my brain. I thought "you know, a human being who was capable of flight would probably look pretty strange - what if you played that for horror?" and I ended up with this.


End file.
